USA TODAY Review

‘Friedken Connection’ probes the mind of a maverick moviemaker

Director William Friedkin, best known for the cinematic one-two punch of The French Connection and The Exorcist in the early '70s, has always been a great raconteur -- a filmmaker who's never played by the rules, considers himself lucky to be alive at 77 after surviving a near-fatal heart attack and has burned more relationships than he can count.

But his new "professional memoir," as he calls it (omitting intimate details of his personal life, including his marriage to former Paramount head Sherry Lansing), is a frank recounting of the method to his madness that helps us better understand the agent provocateur behind his violent movies.

As a poor Jew from Chicago and the son of Russian immigrants, movies provided an opportunity "to be moved and surprised at some revelation about the human condition." Friedkin was as much in awe of Citizen Kane as Hitchcock's work, and from the start of his directing career, he explored the dark side of life with exhilaration and ambiguity. Rather than giving us comfort and joy, he prefers making us uneasy and provoking thought and debate after leaving the theater.

Friedkin's seminal work was a 1962 TV documentary about an African-American convicted of murder on death row, The People vs. Paul Crump. The documentary was compelling enough to get Crump a reprieve and eventually freed on parole. In retrospect, Friedkin believes Crump was guilty, but the experience taught him a valuable lesson about capturing darkness and light in human nature with hard-hitting realism.

Friedkin captured the zeitgeist of disillusionment with his two greatest movies, The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973). The former turned the police thriller on its head, snagging a surprising best-picture Oscar, while the latter became a legendary blockbuster about the "mystery of faith." In both cases, Friedkin took bold risks and was fearless in his filmmaking, relying on guts and instinct.

The director pulled off the most dangerous and ambitious high-speed chase in The French Connection involving a car and a commuter train. He recklessly filmed without a permit in New York City and was fortunate there were no fatalities. Friedkin kept the intensity going throughout the fact-based procedural, but his biggest achievement was getting Gene Hackman to tap the demon inside him for a powerful performance as the anti-hero cop, Popeye Doyle, which earned him an Oscar as well.

Then Friedkin wrestled with a demon in The Exorcist, based on William Peter Blatty's best seller, and he really tapped a nerve. According to the director, the movie's success can be attributed to Blatty's religious faith and Friedkin's agnostic counterpoint. He even persisted in getting a more emotional payoff from Max von Sydow after the actor confessed that he didn't believe in God.

After The Exorcist, however, hubris set in and Friedkin descended into darker and more controversial territory. But, like the wrong-way freeway car chase in his comeback film, To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), Friedkin now revels in going against the grain. Who knows? With the digital re-release this year of his most notorious flop, Sorcerer (1977), Friedkin might even rehabilitate his ultimate downer.

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Bill Desowitz is the author of James Bond Unmasked.

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